This Article  • References  • Full text PDF  • Send to a friend  • Save in My Folder  • Save to citation manager  • Permissions  Citing Articles  • Citation map  • Citing articles on HighWire  • Citing articles on Web of Science (14)  • Contact me when this article is cited  Related Content  • Similar articles in this journal  Social Bookmarking   What's this?

A Report of Twenty Cases

DON W. CHAPMAN, M.D.; LIEUT COL. E. OVERHOLT, MC

AMA Arch Intern Med. 1957;99(5):708-715.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text PDF and any section headings.

Pericarditis has usually been thought to be synonymous with serious underlying disease. In the past decade clinicians have become increasingly aware of a relatively benign inflammatory disease involving the pericardium without any known specific etiological agent. In a two-year span on a cardiac service in the Army, 20 cases of so-called idiopathic benign pericarditis were encountered, and a detailed analysis of these cases will be presented along with the differential diagnosis and prognosis.

Since the introduction of antibiotic therapy, it has been our belief that the disease makes up a higher percentage of pericarditis than was formerly reported. Reeves,¹ in 1953, reported that acute benign pericarditis constituted 10.4% of 108 cases of pericarditis; however, many of these occurred in the preantibiotic era. Part of this discrepancy may occur from the relative age and sex difference between Army and civilian hospitals.

In 1854, Hodges² initially described a case of . . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]

Author Affiliations
Houston, Texas; U. S. Army

Baylor University College of Medicine, Houston, Texas, and the 2nd General Hospital, Landstuhl, Germany.

Footnotes
Submitted for publication Aug. 23, 1956.

CiteULike    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    Twitter     What's this?